Dorian
For the Dorian mode in music, see Dorian mode.The
Dorians were one of the ancient
Hellenic tribes acknowledged by Greek writers. Traditional accounts place their origins in the north, north-eastern regions of Greece, ancient
Macedonia and
Epirus, whence obscure circumstances drove them south into
Attica and the
Peloponnese, to certain
Aegean islands, and to the coast of
Asia Minor. Late mythology gave them an
eponymous founder,
Dorus son of
Hellen, the
mythological patriarch of the
Hellenes.
Beginning about 1150 BC, there was much destruction in the
Peloponnese,
Crete and other places throughout the Mediterranean, involving the destruction of the
Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization and the beginning of the
Greek Dark Ages. Peloponnesian cities burned or destroyed include
Corinth,
Olympia,
Sparta and
Mycenae. Even cities not burned, such as
Athens, went into a prolonged period of decline. Many cities were reduced to villages or abandoned. The written record for this period is nonexistent, due to the abandonment of the
Linear B script. Traditionally, this has been attributed to an invasion by the Dorians, but more recently, there is evidence that they migrated south into the Peloponnessus and the Agean during the Dark Ages instead of invading at the beginning of this period.
Though most of the Doric invaders settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on
Rhodes and in Asia Minor, where in later times the Dorian Hexapolis (the six Dorian cities) would arise:
Halikarnassos (Halicarnassus) and
Knidos (Cnidus) in
Asia Minor,
Kos, and
Lindos,
Kameiros, and
Ialyssos on the island of Rhodes. These six cities would later become rivals with the
Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians also invaded
Crete. These origin traditions remained strong into classical times:
Thucydides saw the
Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting against Dorians" and reported the tradition that the
Syracusans in Sicily were of Dorian descent (
Thucydides, 7.57). Other such "Dorian" colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and the Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. Culturally, in addition to their Doric dialect of Greek, these colonies retained their characteristic
Doric calendar revolving round a cycle of festivals of which the
Hyacinthia and the
Carneia were especially important (
EB 1911).
The Dorians are also credited with the introduction of formalized
pederasty into the Greek arena. Some have postulated this to have taken place at the time of their original migration, others much later, around 630 BCE, starting in Crete and spreading to Sparta and the rest of the Greek city states.
The
Dorian invasion (more often called the
Dorian migration in modern texts) was, until fairly recently, widely considered the cause of the downfall of the Mycenaeans, based on the claims of the Dorians themselves in the time of Classical Greece. However,
archeological finds show that features thought to be from the Dorians did not suddenly arrive with the destruction of the Mycenaean civilization, and in fact the first material signs of the Dorians are from around 1000 BC. These were things such as iron, new weapons, and changes in burial practices from Mycenaean group burials in
tholos tombs to individual burials and cremation. It is more likely that the Mycenaean civilization went into decline, and the Dorians moved south more gradually into the power vacuum this created. This was a time of great upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean (see
Sea People), and the disruption of long-distance trade, as well as civil war and natural disaster, are possible explanations for the destruction of the Mycenaeans. At the same time, there were other population movements such as the colonization of islands in the Aegean sea and the west coast of Asia Minor.
According to a myth based on an
etymological fantasy, the Dorians were named for the minor district of Doris in northern Greece. Their leaders were mythologized as the
Heracleidae, the sons of the legendary hero
Heracles, and the Dorian incursion into Greece in the distant past was justified in the mythic theme of the
"Return of the Heracleidae". The most famous of Dorian groups were the
Spartans, whose austere and martial lifestyle was much admired and feared.
The Doric dialect was spoken along the coast of the
Peloponnese, in
Crete and southwest
Asia Minor. A close relationship between Doric,
North-Western Greek and
ancient Macedonian has been postulated. In later periods other dialects predominated, most notably the
Attic, upon which the
Koine or common Greek language of the
Hellenistic period was based. The main characteristic of Doric was the preservation of Indoeuropean [aː], long <α>, which in Attic-Ionic became [ɛː], <η>.
Tsakonian Greek, a descendant of Doric Greek and source of great interest to linguists, is extraordinarily still spoken in some regions of the Southern Argolid coast of the Peloponnese, on the coast of the modern prefecture of Arcadia.
The
Doric column in architecture and a
Dorian mode in music (see also
guitar chord roots). The column was noted for its simplicity and strength, the music for its martial qualities.The Doric column is still widely used today, particularly in government buildings and other large edifices. See the
Doric order.
*
Greek Dark Ages *
SpartaDie Dorier (
The Dorians),
Karl Otfried Müller (1824).
The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, Karl Otfried Müller, Eng. trans., Oxford, 1830. 2 vols.
The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe CA. 1200 B.C., Robert Drews, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993.
Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History, Sarah B. Pomeroy et al., Oxford University Press, 1999.
*
Meriam-Webster Online Dictionary*http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/prehistory/aegean/theculturesofgreece/dorians.html
*
Dorian invasion, also showing Ionian and Aeolian*
Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: "Dorians"
